Trouble in paradise for Gauguin

Trouble in paradise for Gauguin

Trouble in paradise for Gauguin

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Vision of the Sermon

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Loss of Virginity

Sly fox: The Loss of Virginity, 1890, sums up what had gone before and anticipates later female nudes

Seeing red: Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)

Paul Gauguin is far more widely known for his riotous life than for his art, though once he had in his late twenties begun the slow transition from untrained amateur painter, sculptor and modeller to passionate professional (this progress echoed in his transition from whittler to woodcarver), it was the driving purpose of his art and the primacy he gave to it that shaped, directed and propelled his life. Nevertheless, the title of Tate Modern’s substantial exhibition of his work (the catalogue numbers 155 exhibits but is supported by many more hors de catalogue), Maker of Myth, seems to imply that rather than the novelists and film-makers who with prurient imaginations sucked dry his life for plots, Gauguin himself was responsible for the novellettish mythology that for a century or so has prevented us from seeing his pictures as we should. We should see him as occasionally a painter of masterpieces imbued with telling force and mystery, of paintings both excitingly innovative and supported by intriguing intellectual argument, of images disturbingly Symbolist to a point that is almost mystical, and of Oceanic females too many of whom, no longer rousing his libidinous craving, he painted out of habit, making little more with them than trash for tourists.

Perhaps, in the Parisian years of his flowing Magyar cloak with silver clasps, his broad-brimmed hat, his canne de jonc, astrakhan fez and other dandyisms allied with the boisterous physicality of his behaviour, this constant striving to be obvious and noticed lends weight to the Tate curators’ view that his was indeed a self-made myth. However, it can equally well be argued that all this show was no more than to be expected from artists at a time when so many of them so boasted their bohemianism that it was very much the done thing. Was Gauguin even half as extreme in its demonstration as Augustus John, his early (though only occasional) imitator? As a Johnny-come-lately in the pullulating art world of Paris, he had a point to make — that he was no longer the wealthy amateur who collected paintings by Impressionists, but a professional rival who reached far beyond their prettinesses.

Born in Paris in 1848, a decade younger than Cézanne, a decade older than Seurat (of both of whom he was in some sense a pupil), Gauguin had no early ambition to be a painter. At 17 he became first a merchant and then a naval seaman, his tours of duty ranging from the Arctic to India and South America, his pastimes for six years drinking, whoring and whittling. At 23 he was introduced to a stockbroker, showed some talent in the trade, made money, married Mette (a bourgeois Danish girl from Copenhagen), took up painting, began to collect Impressionist pictures — the First Impressionist Exhibition was in 1874 — and in 1876 one of his own paintings was accepted by the Paris Salon. In 1880, 1881 and 1882 he exhibited work in the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Impressionist Exhibitions; in 1883 he resigned from his stockbroker employers and became a full-time painter; and in 1885 he deserted his wife and family and began the unsettled and poverty-stricken existence that was to take him to Tahiti and the even more isolated Marquesas Islands (both were French dominions) for the last eight years of his life. There, until his death in 1903, his companions were dire penury and thoughts of suicide, alcohol, the advancing consequences of syphilis and a succession of early teenage native girls.

Among some current commentators, his sexual relationships with these pubertal children have engendered prudish, but irrelevant, disapproval. The taking of such companions was the custom of the time and place and in doing so Gauguin did no more than was expected of him by the natives — the sturdy English rubber planter in Malaya did much the same, and more probably with boys. I am more disturbed by his selfishly ignoring his syphilis, for he took it with him when he left Paris for ever in 1895, and it is certain that he gave it to the girls, not they to him. Syphilis is not irrelevant, for even if it did not much affect his sight and brain, at 55 it brought him down. There is only a little evidence of a decline in Gauguin’s hand and eye — the facture of paintings executed in 1902 before a long winter of serious illness is not much less assured than in those a decade earlier; but in July 1901 he wrote that he was "down, defeated by poverty and, above all, illness, in essence premature old age", yet even so he hoped for respite and seemed confident that he had still to reach the culmination of his talent. This was far from the raving of a late-stage syphilitic, but if the disease had not attacked his brain it was certainly ravaging his skeletal body, his legs and feet so consumed by sores that he could hardly walk, and he knew that time was short.

We should recognise that beyond the mythical, Gauguin was a man who not only took to painting because, like Van Gogh, "he had to", who in the absence of conventional training struggled for years to make himself proficient, but who believed that an artist must be intelligent, a man whose brain is superior to his eye. It was indeed his fierce intelligence that compelled him to reject the whimsical response of the Impressionists to the thing seen, be it landscape, portrait or still life, and instead subject them to analysis and impose his maturing style. He was later to reject Seurat and Signac too, but their experiments with pure colour — the damned dot of Pointillism — opened his eyes to its use in far larger areas intense and rich in tone, separated by heavy outlines, detail almost discarded. He hauled the horizon ever higher up the canvas, occasionally beyond its limit, and in thus flattening pictorial space, flattened and simplified his forms and introduced as many viewpoints and perspectives as he felt his subjects needed; and he learned too to orchestrate his arbitrary fields of colour, modulated by his brushstrokes and the grain of canvas, so that in harmony they lay together like Isaiah’s lion and lamb. Quoting Delacroix, he described this unity as "the music of painting, an emotion appealing directly and intimately to the soul " It is an emotion, I must add, that few of us quite comprehend.

Apart from his earliest sub-Impressionist paintings, of which the most remarkable and ponderous survivor is Woman Sewing of 1880 (a nude alas not borrowed for the exhibition from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen — to which all Gauguin enthusiasts should go), Gauguin’s handling of paint was always immediately recognisable. By the mid-1880s he had developed a characteristic brushstroke that is in essence a system of almost vertical parallel hatching with thin lines of paint applied with quite small sable brushes; gradually he combined it with the smudged and scrubbed effect of broader hog’s hair brushes that eventually dominated his canvases. Of impasto he made very little use, and my impression is that — as with the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec — his were never intended to be coated with the glister of heavy varnish but preserved as matt. At the end of his life he occasionally employed a canvas coarser even than used by Sickert in his dotage — perhaps, when unable to afford canvas, he used sacking; it suited neither his facture nor his heavy drawing of outlines. He was not much interested in form and volume — even of the human figure, his prime subject.

We are constantly aware of the external triggers of his genius, of the Japanese woodcuts, images Buddhist and Egyptian, ancient Greek and Roman, ethnographical and immediately local, that nourished his imagination, and of the prints, photographs and reproductions he may have carried in his luggage. Yet his stylistic development seems so utterly logical as to have been predestined, each step coherent and well-judged, the lessons of Degas, Puvis and Cézanne, of Symbolism, Emile Bernard and the artists’ colony of Pont-Aven shrewdly absorbed, The Loss of Virginity of 1890 both a summing-up of what had gone before and a mysterious but cogent anticipation of the Nevermore that was to come.

We see his late and last works as evoking Eden, Paradise and, particularly, Lethe, yet at the same time as menacing, hermetic and disquieting, every lotus-eater a succubus, Gauguin compelling us to share the fear and foreboding that haunted him — it is as though Munch’s Scream is faintly audible. These are not comfortable images. Of one aspect of his late work, however, we know too little; dubbed obscene after his death, the decorations of his hut, more than 20 canvases and perhaps hundreds of drawings were destroyed by the prudish authorities of the Marquesas; the rest, and his belongings, were promptly dispersed by auction in Papeete, the commercial centre of Tahiti, but hardly a branch of the Paris art market. If we sense an underlying sexual narrative in the surviving pictures, we may, perhaps, imagine the destroyed excursions of his declining libido.

Recognition of this barbarian, this brigand (words he used of himself), this wild, selfish and self-destructive genius, swiftly followed on his death; in 1906, within three years, the Salon d’Automne mounted a memorial exhibition of the full range of his work, trounced his detractors, vindicated his ideas and set him on the highest pinnacle of Mount Olympus (this he did not quite deserve). The list of those on whom he exerted influence is very long, Matisse and Picasso at its head, the Nabis, the Fauves, Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, Bonnard and Vuillard, Munch and Kandinsky all following, with, in England, Gilman, Ginner, Gore and Bevan wagging the tail but, like anxious dogs, not truly understanding.

All this is evident to those who already know something of Gauguin, but to those who do not, the exhibition may well be disappointing. Gauguin’s paintings cry out for daylight but in Tate Modern this is not allowed and we must see them in ill-judged artificial light. The exhibition rooms themselves contribute a measure of disorder and confusion — the first few far too small and awkwardly cranked for visitors to get their bearings, the sequence of the later interrupted by the pull of lateral rooms. I doubt if many visitors unaware of the clear stages of Gauguin’s development will leave the exhibition comprehensively informed, for if on entry they know nothing of, for example, Pont-Aven, on exit they will still know nothing. Gauguin requires a chronological hang and comparative material, but in the current modish fashion, Tate Modern has abandoned this — it is yet another example of curators talking to curators instead of to a public willing and anxious to learn. On a practical curatorial point, the temperature seems absurdly high, the humidity menacingly low.